ABOVE: Crews searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet launched a targeted underwater hunt on Friday for the plane’s black boxes along a stretch of remote ocean
LATEST NEWS:
- Underwater search begins for missing plane’s black box flight recorders
- Malaysia reportedly refuses families’ requests to hear cockpit recording
- Girlfriend of one of the passengers says she “does not believe the plane had crashed”
- People offer prayers for the missing passengers and crew of flight MH370
TORONTO – Crews searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet launched a targeted underwater hunt on Friday for the plane’s black boxes along a stretch of remote ocean.
There are possibly just days left before the devices’ batteries are expected to run out.
READ MORE: ‘We will not give up’ says Malaysia PM, search for missing jet continues
Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search, told reporters on Friday that the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield and the British navy’s HMS Echo will converge along a 240-kilometre (149-mile) track in the southern Indian Ocean.
The plane’s data recorders emit a ping that can be detected by the equipment on board the ships.
Get breaking National news
But the battery-powered devices stop transmitting the pings about 30 days after a crash – meaning searchers have little time left before the batteries on Flight 370’s black boxes die out.
READ MORE: Malaysia police say jet mystery may never be solved
Locating the data recorders and wreckage after that is possible, but incredibly difficult.
Houston also said media that the search area was refined the previous day, based on updated analysis of images and other data.
Fourteen planes and nine ships were taking part in Friday’s hunt across a 217,000 square kilometre (84,000 square mile) expanse of ocean, about 1,700 kilometres (1,100 miles) northwest of Perth, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre overseeing the search said.
The area the ships are searching was chosen based on hourly satellite pings the aircraft gave off after it vanished from radar on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Malaysia reportedly refuses families requests to hear cockpit recording
The Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation has reportedly denied a request by families to release the audio recording of communications that occurred in the cockpit, according to CNN.
The department’s chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, allegedly told the relatives that “even the families of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid have not been allowed to listen to the recording because it is still part of an ongoing investigation.”
READ MORE: Malaysian officials release cockpit transcript
Meanwhile, the girlfriend of Philip Wood, one of the passengers on the missing flight said she does not believe the plane had crashed.
“I have yet to find any expert who I have talked to that off-record has said they believed the plane has crashed. Everybody believes it has been taken,” Sarah Bajc said.
– with files from The Associated Press
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.